Some people think and act in ways that are just different.
In order to promote fairness, standard evaluations and treatments need continual exploration and modification to meet our growing awareness of diverse individuals and diverse populations. This is a team blog. Authors posting are; Ed and Wayward.
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Science

March 18, 2012

Policy makers and their supporters claim that people's behaviors are becoming worse. More specifically they claim that children's behavior is becoming worse. However, these same policy makers and supporters are claiming that behavioral products, and the techniques are advancing.

For the purpose of my focus here; whether their evaluation of behavior is correct doesn't really matter. My point is the claim behavioral conditioning is advancing or that the products are become more sophisticated and humane doesn't fit how the attitude toward the people receiving them is becoming more desperate. This desperation is causing more severe and dangerous methods of control along with those who implement them often becoming less empathetic toward those receiving them.

The behaviorists in the U.S. are involved in turf wars, which include how Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) is marketed. The kinder and gentler Positive Behavioral Support (PBS) is being marketed by some as the answer to outdated and no-longer-appropriate "old school" ABA. However, the foundational principals set by earlier behaviorists who found ways to market the application of this new science provide the newest products their legitimacy. Now that it's been established that people don't possess what their treatment harms, there are fewer objections.

You of course can't read much about how the entire approach of behaviorism is inappropriate at best and very dangerous at worst because there is no market for such criticism. In the same way that the mental health industry is designed to improve the lives of everyone but the one who receives treatment, behavior modification is evaluated by those who live with, educate, and implement the treatment rather than those who receive it. This means that professionals and other authorities are prohibited from knowing the harmful effects as well as prohibited from sharing views that would harm the marketing potential of the product.

It's important to understand how those who receive behavior modification are trained to be compliant. Therefore, it's likely that someone who would otherwise tell how abusive the treatment has been will be concerned about the likely punishment that results from doing so.

The work of behaviorists could not become more humane during the same time that the lists of types of people who are seen to need the service is growing, the behaviors being treated are seen to be more severe, and the laws which provide protection for the treated are increasingly aiding the treatment providers with protection instead.

There are reports that advocacy efforts have increased during this time. However, this has not been nearly sufficient to meet the demand for the protection needed. While institutions over the years have added carpet and air conditioning, this has been disguised as and substituted for the needed protection against abuse. Furthermore, protection agencies which have been developed during this time have primarily provided more power to a specific subset of parents of children with disabilities while providing the disabled with powerful sounding names like consumer as a substitute.

More people are being incarcerated now than ever before and there are a broader set of laws for which they can be punished. Behaviorists work toward providing children with particular grades and labels, which will determine their path at earlier ages. Their goal is to have more rules (and have only a single set) and have them be applied to a broader set of people. It's ideal to believe that morality and ability won't be lumped together, but it's not practical.

The same type of marketing specialists who promote Fruit Loops and Apple Jacks by using fruit names and describing how including oats will benefit your heart will use positive names and the endorsement of well compensated scientists to sell behavior modification. Until or unless those who receive the treatment begin to be consulted and continually monitored and questioned as to its effectiveness and potential for abuse, you can be sure that along with better behaviorism you are buying sugar-coated law enforcement at the expense of the heart, mind, and soul of the most vulnerable people.

June 08, 2011

Every time activists in the U.S. have sought to reform the mental health/developmental disabilities/ mental retardation/etc. system, their efforts (which always became compromises) ultimately strengthened the system and made it more difficult to stop.

Dorothea Dix came along when a change was obviously needed and set a president for how reform was to take place. Mainly, this reformation put the determination of rights for those mainly affected by the system in the hands of political opportunists.

The response to the public recognition of the abuses in places like Willowbrook included the creation the Protection and Advocacy agency which protected the system from being independently investigated.

In the same way, that sterilization was originally sold as a right, forceable institutionalization law are sold as the way to ensure that those who were in the most need of care could be assured adequate support.

Today it's obvious to those who are treated the worst by this system that it was never designed for their benefit but is instead an unfair weapon in the class war for allowing the judicial system to incarcerate misfits and promote the careers of politicians.

There is no mystery in why such low standards are used to evaluate science regarding autism or why the pharmaceutical companies have started a new propaganda campaign to promote their new products due to the ritalin campaign getting old.

Of course the behaviorists are getting away with more abuse than ever (including murder) and the solution is described as impossible due to the severity of the behavior problems. The abuse is being exposed mainly by those who are advocating more formal integration of standard behaviorism in schools by using laws that claim that children will be safer.

A class war is determined by hierarchy. The people at the bottom of the ladder know very well how the system works and are listened to the least. If you don't yet see that compromise is not an option it's mainly because you aren't at the bottom yet. However, if you review the history of the system and analyze how quickly the system is expanding to include you, you'll understand that either you or someone very close to you soon will be.

February 12, 2011

In an ideal society, a label that indicated an intelligence deficit would be beneficial. It could be used to provide either accommodations or more realistic and focused expectations. However, the way these labels have been used by the compulsory school system in the United States has taught us to relate this to a value system that can be quite harmful.

The method used for making this judgment is severely limited in both accuracy and practicality. The American justice system depends on such arbitrary evaluations to provide more latitude within law enforcement, which leads to agents having more unlimited control. If this system's leadership were challenged more so that they were required to explain the reasoning behind punishments for the population labeled (either by formal diagnosis or socially acceptable insult) as stupid, crazy, and immoral/lacking in character development, this would ultimately encourage everyone to take more responsibility. It's difficult for people to understand a responsibility and the benefits for accepting it when their leaders aren't willing to.

Thinking skills typically have much less to do with brainpower and formal training than the advertising for academia would lead people to believe. The tests to evaluate aptitude and academic progress provides advantages for a small number of people. The rest is shown to instead be inferior and taught to be compliant.

The problems faced by business owners during the industrial revolution were met by them claiming that unnatural and inappropriate breeding was a threat to necessary progress and the future of the human race. These claims were used to justify their scientific proposals for population control, which continues to play a dominant role in politics and the judicial system.

"Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into human faculty and its development.[13] He believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged by provision of monetary incentives."

Here is some of what has been said by respected people who have influenced the public perceptions of this supposed problem.

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” [1.1] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell

"It does not, however, seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible... As the human race could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention to breed should ever become general."- Thomas R. Malthus. An Essay on Population. 1798

AND

"In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it."- Jacques Cousteau, 1991 UNESCO courier

Margaret Sanger, the Founder of Planned Parenthood, advocated eugenics, describing it as a way to eliminate "human waste" from society.

"Everywhere we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be bourne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born."

"it is obvious that if in the future racial qualities are to be improved, the improving must be wrought mainly by favoring the fecundity [fertility] of the worthy types... At present, we do just the reverse. There is no check to the fecundity of those who are subnormal..."

John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) a major figure in the eugenics movement founded the American Medical Missionary Board (but soon changed its name to the Race Betterment Foundation). Kellogg himself was an important and respected figure who authored numerous medical and eugenics treatises in order to lobby for policy of "national eugenics." Kellogg, who launched the breakfast cereals industry by introducing granola to the American public as a health food.

The corporate experiment established by Americans (known as the United States) has traditionally attempted to divide and conquer the unwanted public. One method for achieving this is by encouraging confusion over the meaning of personal responsibility. Rather than encourage each other and work together to challenge unfair elitist domination, society is instead obsessed with following the traditions of unreasonable standards for critical evaluations.

In this video, State Controlled Consciousness, John Taylor Gatto explains how compulsory schooling is used to provide an expanded military that protects the rules which are decided by the state. The United States adopted this tool of government from Prussia, which encourages us to believe that there is little or no value to an individual human or their creative process. Since the rules can be taught by motivating people to avoid punishment, the rules don't get challenged and the elite who possessed the power is allowed to preserve it.

When the government control becomes an unregulated obsession for an elite few, the remaining public is following standards that they instinctively know lacks the sound judgment. At this point, they can either choose to revolutionize the system, or they can instead become apathetic and frustrated from being unable to trust their neighbors or even themselves and their own judgment.

The advances in technology are now accelerating dramatically pursuant to the insatiable appetite of consumers. This appetite was encouraged so that the market could be deceptively described as the answer to the world's problems. This provided industry leaders with more power and ultimately more authority. Most all scientific discoveries are encouraged and glorified based on the establishment of the same misplaced faith in an unregulated market. This creates advantages for a few people and is used as the justification for excluding the majority for being invalid.

An appetite for technical accuracy has been established in accordance with the encouragement of the myth that we can decide the accuracy of information based on the same rigorous scientific evaluations. Due to the lack of ethical regulations that would encourage us to evaluate ideas, we are accepting commercial brands of truth and hyper critically micro managing each other in a depressingly hopeless and fatal way.

Psychology is a brand of processing ideas. It is promoted in order to encourage the validity in scholastic pursuits. The academic industry advertises that those who achieve their awards are superior in ability, judgment, and character. The science of human behavior(as it's described) is mainly used as a political tool for controlling the public. It's used more as a method for controlling thoughts and behaviors than for understanding them. It enslaves consumers by outwitting them rather than teaching productive ways for evaluating and using information.

A society that was truly concerned with justice and human rights would not be allowing the continuing abuse of people based on a punitive justice system deceptively defined as the mental health industry. In such a society, the abuses associated with Applied behavioral analysis (ABA) (originally researched to determine methods of manipulating prisoners of war) would have been enough to warrant an appropriate investigation. Instead, the harmful traditions of the public school system (which have gotten worse since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was established) continue so that radical change is not seen as necessary. The leadership along with their past misdeeds continues to go unchallenged while voters continue to be taught that most all political compromise is necessary.

Since the state agencies defined as Protection and Advocacy have become practically as ineffective as those that serve vocational rehabilitation needs, the concerned parents of schoolchildren who are being abused are deceptively provided with a substitute solution. Rather than look at how the nature of Applied Behavioral Analysis will likely be implemented in an abusive way, the bureaucratic leaders look for ways to justify and protect their reputation. Instead of admitting their mistakes and making the radical changes which are needed, they instead direct the public's attention to teachers being inadequately trained in the proper use of this supposed "discipline".

A newer and better type of ABA described as Statewide Positive Behavioral Support has been substituted for the important regulation that is needed for teachers abusing authority. The goal of the school system (despite the way typically presented) is to reestablish behavior standards as the focus of compulsory education for most students so that federal laws are easier to enforce.

A society that was truly concerned with justice and human rights for everyone would be able to look at the origins and traditions of the public school system and find better ways to help more students become prepared for adulthood. This would include of course addressing the problems presented by intelligence quotient (I.Q.) test, which were based on eugenic goals and finding more appropriate means of evaluating students.

However, in order to avoid accepting this responsibility, the lack of student achievement was used to explain the need for more exclusive standardized test, which was sold by legislation called No Child Left Behind. (Of course this achieves the opposite goal from the one that the name suggests.)

Apathy and hyper criticism is two sides of the same coin. Both encourage an attitude that impedes progress and promotes dependence and oppression. Commercial advertisement provides a constant source of frustration and dissatisfaction by teaching people to evaluate their worth in relation to the type of people they can never become who own things that they can never afford.

"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"~ Audre Lorde

Blaming each other only weakens us so that we are vulnerable to deception. The majority of people are not empowered by standard evaluations, and, unless we challenge those standards we will never recognize and trust the value in our neighbors and in ourselves and we will destroy ourselves in the process.

Personal responsibility should not divide and weaken us so that we can be manipulated by fear and doubt. People don't need to be convinced of the rewards which come from the achievement of truly worthwhile goals. When people believe in themselves and their own ability, they find ways to do things and naturally avoid the punishment which comes from either failure or cheating.

﻿ The value in ourselves which we need to recognize in order to be more successful becomes more apparent when we are willing to accept the same in others. This kind of experience is what will sustain humanity and ultimately the human race.

January 27, 2011

In the past half-century, technological advances have become an increasingly dominant aspect of the global economy. As technological manufacturers have taught us it is impractical to repair our networking devices, we have adopted the belief that humans are composite of efficient or defective independent parts, and that we can be evaluated accordingly as valid or invalid.

Now that the majority of people are serving the enterprise known as science, in one way or another, the corporations which dominate this field have become a political force that works together with government to control as many aspects of our behavior as possible.

We are taught the central nervous system which is most active within the space between our ears is an end unto itself, and that we must submit to the scholastic theories of psychologist and psychiatrist so that our thought processes will be adjusted properly. We've learned to hyper-critically micro manage each other and quickly devalue any diverse expression that deviates from what the current leadership has determined to be the norm.

Medical models are dependent on behavioral treatments that propose to chemically alter the brain structure. These are researched by using the least valued public as expendable products (human lab rats) so that valued workers are more easily manipulated, and the elite are provided with more comforts.

In addition, many among the labeled community aren't exposed to the way that all these specific labels of a learning disability, developmental disorder, psychiatric condition, or psychobiological disorder practically vanishes for most people who are among the class which is least valued once they are institutionalized. In such environments the abuses of control are justified either by the person in care being considered unable to control their actions or unwilling to submit to authority.

Most of what we are taught are cures to the incorrect configuration of our brains or the maladjusted way we respond to our environment doesn't exist in any other way than how close our expressions come to a standard that was set to glorify the characteristics which are most comfortable to the people in positions of leadership. All sorts of atrocities are committed and justified by the claim that it is done in the name of science, progress, and the common good.

The most outrageous and harmful treatments and attempted cures are justified through the sophisticated fear-based advertising campaigns that describe cases of severity. The biggest deception of these campaigns is the exploitation of severe problems. While people with the most severe cases are shown as the reason for more research into cures and treatments, they are not the ones who benefit from scientific discovery.

Instead, in addition to the exploitation, they typically get described as beyond repair, aberrant and unwilling, too old, or that the main problem is due to poor character.

The way severe neurological disorders may contribute to a violent response has never been advertised in order to provide a better understanding or treatment for the people who have them. Instead, in a very few cases it gets accepted in the judicial system as an excuse (which then gets little if any attention or aid) and the belief that these disorders are associated with violence mainly provides justification for incarceration and harmful treatments based on the presumption of guilt for the undesirable and inconvenient public.

If our attitudes about people don't change so that we accept more diverse expressions as valid and important the sophistication of our technology and scientific research will go to provide worse treatment and even more widespread abuse. This is the current trend despite claims that science is leading us away from our barbaric ways.

The design for the cure attitude exhibited in the way it's advertised was never meant to provide more people with aid or understanding and eliminating competition certainly won't make the already accepted any stronger. Unless we focus on acceptance first and gear scientific research toward helping people whom we are already willing to accept as valid regardless, the result will be more expressions, which are shown to be inappropriate and more people who are thereby defined as obsolete.

January 22, 2011

It may be best for industries that the public believes that all sophistication of science and scholarly views are beneficial but this broken-until-fixed-by-the-psych-industry is and always has been quite harmful to the majority of the public.

There are as many successful ways for people with disorders that involve thinking (psychological, psychiatric, learning disability, and developmental disorder) to live as there are individuals that have them. (This includes both the diagnosed and the would-be-diagnosed).

Unfortunately, the few ways that are advertised most and encouraged by most people as successful/appropriate have the best market value (including what is most funded by government aid as tools for the judicial system) and therefore, prevent most people from getting any aid all. The ones discouraged and excluded are of course the ones that need acceptance and accommodation the most. The excluded group is subjected to bullying and fewer opportunities for relationships and jobs pursuant to the mainstream attitudes that result.

The system that created these disorders was designed to be oppressive rather than empowering. As more people are diagnosed the cure factor becomes an even more powerful weapon and appeals to more people who become even more afraid of becoming disenfranchised. This creates even more division for people who are already excluded by other social factors.

The Internet is a networking tool that is mainly used to narrow the view of what is and isn't acceptable and prevent as many expressions of diversity as possible. The corporations will be blamed for our ruthless abandonment and harsh treatment of people who are inconvenient and uncomfortable but only because they are seen as profiting the most from it. It could never occur without our help.

January 09, 2011

There has never been a massive war against weakness and ignorance. Such effort that is defined as having that goal is instead always designed to eliminate inconvenient people using labels that indicate inferiority. Most of the population is targeted in this way.

There are powerful weapons to encourage ignorance, doubt, and fear but the most powerful ones are geared to eliminate the people who are thereby labeled ignorant, doubtful, and fearful.

As a result, knowledge is rare and the arrogance that accompanies aggression about the claims of TRUTH and knowledgeable people are abundant. We of course can't know what ideas are truly best as long as the regulations allow for discrimination based on convenience and might-is-right attitudes.

Many of the ideas that shape our common experience are commercially expressed but there is never going to be a true mass media. The limitations on the exchange of information and ideas will always be narrow. The limitation serves a more important purpose to those who provide the service than the profits gained by serving as many customers as possible. In order to preserve the industry, the preferred consumers are encouraged to believe that they are deserving and then go on to degrade and dis-empower the excluded population. (This excluded group is of course never represented and practically never heard from on the internet).

Greed blinds the industry leaders to the self-destruction involved with the illusions of control. When those who can pass their exclusionary standards accept the royal label of superiority, they are equally unable to comprehend the consequences.

There are too many harmful agendas that victimize people who become excluded, abused, or otherwise disenfranchised for anyone to claim to have earned an honorable place in society. Someone else's rights are always exploited to provide for honorable labels and those who control the spin of the story that the cooperate media relay will never willingly expose this information.

It really wouldn't matter if some people were stronger, smarter, wiser, etc. to those who think in controlling and exclusionary ways. The thinking within the realm of blind ambition will always be prone to searching for the ways that the standards can become even more exclusive and more clever ways to disguise their aggression and exploitation as justified and earned.

These leaders aren't nearly as powerful as we are led to believe. In fact, none of the goals that will ultimately lead to our destruction can be achieved without the approval of most of the people who are worst affected.

The human race has not been overwhelmed by some Stockholm syndrome epidemic nor are we just cattle or sheep who have lost the ability to reason independently. Our future depends on how well we stop focusing on the ability that the chosen few who are openly discriminated against have to rise above the oppression and meet the standards that "the rest" are able to and begin challenging the exclusive agenda behind those standards.

Our most valuable resource is very available. It is the belief we have in each other. When people can believe in themselves and each other the ordinary ideas, beliefs, and views we have and the empowerment which accompanies that will lead to extraordinary ideas for resources never before imagined. These ideas won't need any official label or validation. Their validity will be apparent in the ways they are effective and successful.

December 16, 2010

Learning different perspectives of American history reminds me that much of the leadership problem in the past century resulted from a distorted view of community. The philosophy involved seems to liken a community to a chain and the metaphor that describes the philosophy is: "a chain is only as strong as the weakest link."

Such thought designs are contrary to creative and innovative thinking. In a chain, each link serves the same purpose and can therefor be appropriately judged by the standardized test for strength and ranked accordingly. However, it's not natural for people to provide this convenience, and it's dangerous to attempt to demand it.

Unfortunately, many aspects of society are influenced by this type of thinking.

When the goal of a community is for individuals to have no other value than the way they serve it, it will either seek to be efficient, which leads to extreme and unreasonable methods of exclusion, or it will seek to be inclusive in convienient/pitiful-based charity ways, which ultimately lead to the same conclusion.

If you give people something to do that is seen as having no particular value, that value judgment will ultimately extend to how people themselves are seen and societies exclusion and elimination of them, which will simply be more covert and nuanced. When the community doesn't recognize this exercise in futility it can be much worse than if they did, and were seeing the need to address it.

This thinking is particularly detrimental to the respect and dignity of persons with disabilities, and it lends itself very conveniently to unnecessary behavioral standards and their strict enforcement.

The absurdity is never so clear as when this affects advocacy related to autism. Some have even suggested that there is an autism community which of course is impossible. The way to ensure that negative stereotypes about autistics continue and that the political system remains unchallenged so that educational and vocational opportunities are unattainable to the majority is by keeping advocates involved in club activities and meaningless personality-based debates.

When one person exploits their advantage for deciding public policy by using the claim that whatever a publicly recognized authority presumes is someone's severity of symptoms (or lack of them) is the way to distinguish their right to voice their view rather than evaluate what the view is, and someone else argues, the environment is effectively stagnant and progress is impossible.

It's the same with someone who describes causation and another who refutes the scientific evidence or someone who suggests that regulating an abuse of persons with disabilities in jails, mental institutions, and schools with federally mandated behavioral programs is an appropriate compromise. There's no way to judge scientific evidence or the sincere concern for individual welfare of the people involved in policymaking if people are aware of the corruption that tends to rule how these systems operate. Even so, these personality/popularity contests are what often pass for Internet autism discussions.

I can't imagine how anyone could trust the compromises and incremental alterations that are made by policymakers with regard to the rights of persons with a disability when the negotiation chambers for policymakers are patterned identically to the way of our judicial system.

The two party system defines much of how people debate issues. It presupposes that compromise is imperative and limits our choices. As long as each idea can only be ranked by the narrow context of how it compares with another, which can be influenced in an unlimited number of unfair advantages which we're forbidden to discuss, we are hostage to the stagnation and exclusion that the leadership defines as progressive.

The idea that the United States operates with three separate branches of government is misleading. Our judicial system in all its forms is a futile exercise in a political debate, and it's rare that an idea which isn't presented by someone who has been identified as a player/compromiser within the system is ever considered.

Of course intelligence is judged by standardized test, which was designed by people who were mainly interested in population control/eugenics. Of course there is a streamlining of the labeled schoolchildren to expedite class divisions, institutionalization and disenfranchisement and prevent challenges to the top-down elitist control. Of course the US medical system is completely chaotic and harmful to most of the public. Of course that medical system is primarily funded by the sale and distribution of mind altering drugs that are introduced to schoolchildren at an early age to provide teachers with more control.... we aren't taught that we can trust the average public citizen like we do the policymakers. Therefore, if we can't trust the public they will have to be controlled rather than risk any challenges to the status quo (which were taught is progressive).

We can't make all our decisions with convenience being the top priority and expect to maintain any type of security. People act more chaotically when they have less encouragement to think and when thinking is suppressed through intimidation, exclusion, and a constant barrage of images that encourage immediate gratification and hopelessness for the sake of community and solidarity, there will of course less trust and more attempts to regain a sense of control through violence.

People can't keep feeding the monster they want to destroy. Effective change requires that we radically broaden our acceptance of diversity in order to strengthen the community rather than continuing to be unfairly exclusive for the sake of protection and security. It's important that more people understand how few people are actually represented in the policy decisions that are made, which govern their lives and how wide the realm of disenfranchisement extends.

If people are thinking, they will find more ways to be compassionate and inclusive but if convenience and distrust are more important we will recognize more types of uselessness, and the only creative thinking will be used to find methods for exterminating the excess. These danger affects everyone and thinking for solutions is imperative.

November 28, 2010

So many of the commercial messages which are designed to teach us a set of values are appealing to our sense of fear. People are aware that the chase for attainment is futile but will strive to prevent becoming "or appearing to be" an invalid or non-valid person. We are most afraid of our own inadequacies and exploiting that is a powerful and effective tool.

The very small portion of people who are capable of exploiting any type of government system have traditionally shown that without the public's objection, they will do just that.

There is nothing about the experience of any plant or animal that is complacent and accepting of their impending doom. Only humans would be so arrogant as to believe in the myth of laziness and fatality. Everything about life is an expression of someone's choices about what they want. The only practical way for government to operate effectively is to teach people to make wise choices and reward them for doing so in order for them to feel empowered by their ability.

There is no worse crime perpetrated against the planet than for people engaged in the practice of governing choosing to encourage the public to make unwise choices as well as intentionally creating unfairness, inequality, and exploiting people based on class distinctions. When we choose to believe that our betterment will result from glorifying this system, we are involved in the very same crime.

Nothing has been more intimidating and exploitive of the human spirit than the glorification of scholastic pursuits. The myth involved in advertising this industry is that it is designed to encourage reason, and dignity as well as promote liberty. By accepting this and seeing that only a few of the people who are ranked by this standardization achieve a valid label we are participating in our own destruction. Of course people aren't doing this due to some type of lack of motivation. It is instead due to being impulsively motivated based on deception.

With the industrial revolution which encouraged a system of products and consumers, Western civilization adopted compulsory schooling as a supplementary method of ranking individuals. Psychology was not meant to empower the masses but rather to distract their attention. The labels used are not meant to give people an understanding, of how they learn, how they can be accommodated, or what areas of their health need to be addressed. Instead a medical model is used for stigmatization and marginalization.

It is impossible for any living organism to lack self-awareness. The myth to the contrary, was taught so that a hierarchy of human worth could be sold to the public and families who have acquired resources (through whatever means just or corrupt) could protect the illusion of their superiority.

No one with the goal of empowering the public ever sat down, comprehensively analyzed all the most pertinent data, and created a system of labeling and treating the public for psychological disturbances. Believing that this happened is why we have the most corrupt system of medicine in the West, which was ever devised and why it works to prevent rather than promote the best healthcare.

While it's important to recognize how our leadership's devotion to empirical goals has led to an exaggerated military industrial complex and how warfare experiments have been used on invalid or non-valid citizens, the belief in what has been called the Manchurian candidate is not empowering at all.

If we believe that the human mind is only valid due to the physical components called the brain and that every reaction can be predetermined by scientific tools of measurement, we are thereby subjecting ourselves to worse atrocities being committed due to the value this indicates humans as having.

At this point in history, we have adopted sophisticated technology at a rate which was never imagined. However, to believe that our current understanding of the physical world is so advanced that humans can be taught to behave with no more sophistication than any other animal is to submit to the pessimism that corporations can use to further demean and exploit us.

It is possible for the people who are involved in schools, medicine, and the politics that governs them to be involved in this system with the knowledge and understanding of how it is corrupt and also alter its course. We are also all existing in a symbiotic relationship where most of the people's efforts are not encouraged or even acknowledged. Our system of ranking and exploitation has considered most of the human population to be invalid and unnecessary. This is our greatest and most valuable resource and to concentrate on the importance of any other resource at their expense is the quickest way to pursue our own destruction. We have the capacity to do better.

November 12, 2010

The ways similar subjects relate to one another can be difficult to understand due to how morality and ethics, separate from other subjects, are typically decided individually based more on emotion than practicality. Collective mentality is how governments contradict the emotions and mental process of the individual and teach them to de-value themselves and their creative spirit. When people describe all things being relative without considering this, discussion becomes chaotic.

Despite the goal of creating appropriate and accurate standards of speech being impossible, people tend to argue as if one person's ability to meet the standards can be measured as greater than another. In the same way, that information is given a royal endorsement with only a few options being explored (and a few royals allowed to express different ideas) variations of verbal expression are used to determine people's ability and the value of their ideas. In the world of academics the silliness of this standard judgment seems less understood by those involved in the process.

The goal of scientific research is mainly to encourage the validity of science and protect what has been described as knowledge by a scientist. The definition given by Wikipedia for science is here.

We have no way of knowing who were the best thinkers in ancient Greece because the standard of measurement excluded most people from even being considered. The thoughts they described were within a narrow realm of the beliefs and ideas that questioned the superiority of the empire's methods were never considered valid. Long before eugenics was a word used for the elimination of invalids Aristotle and Plato published these views: (note this site is described as a Nazi fan site)

These so called superior thinkers showed contempt for independent decisions and variety of ideas. They wrote rule books for others that were considered the best humans to follow so that the State would always be honored and would make decisions about whose life was valuable and whose was not. This was, and still is, considered by the most valued members of society who mainly influence decisions about public policy, to be the best way to preserve what is considered civilization.

In several hundred years, the philosophy that protected this empire has changed very little because those who have had power have used it to eliminate diversity, promote slavery, and discourage all types of independence and democracy.

For example, the empirical ambitions of the United States are promoted in very similar ways to that of ancient Greece. Only a very few of the considered elite are even included as being valuable citizens who achieve a high school education.

"This report finds that only about half of all students served by the main school systems in the nation's 50 largest cities graduate from high school."

Part of the myth that sustains poverty and oppression in the United States is that we have a continuum of opportunity rather than dividing spectrums according to class and economic distinction. This supports the myth that our political system is a democracy and that opportunities for economic success (and sometimes even survival) is not predetermined.

In this article by John Taylor Gatto, he describes how the leadership in the United States set up the compulsory education program we have today based on the success of a similar model used in Prussia to discourage democracy and free thought in favor of a powerful military. Those targeted for this type of education were not those who were thought to be the future leaders but instead were expected to be soldiers or exploited factory workers who would do well at following orders.

On the other hand, the leadership of the United States, is provided a very different type of education where their esteem and the validity of their ideas are encouraged.

In this interview Gatto explains more about the validity of the standardized tests given to US public school students. Here is an excerpt from the interview: (JTG is an abbreviation for John Taylor Gatto)

"MP: That's exactly the problem. See, if your kid is already scoring 95 percent on the standardized tests, you think, "Boy, this is great, right?"

JTG: No! The tests don't measure what they purport to measure. I guarantee you they don't do that. Let me give you an experiment you could run anywhere in this country and it will work. I used to take the kids who scored the very highest on the standardized tests. I would say, "I will demonstrate to you that you don't know how to read, even though your test score says that you know how to read better than anybody in the school." So I'd get these groups together, I mean, I'd do this year after year, and I would give them an extremely simple classic book to read, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. It's still in print, sells more copies in the year 2000 than it ever sold in 1928 when it was printed. It's a story of teenagers in the first world war. It's written in teenage language, with teenage concepts, and there are hardly any three-syllable words in the book, I mean it's mostly one- or two-syllable words, so it's extremely simple to read. I said, "I will give you an open book test on the first 20 pages of that book, and I will be very surprised if anyone in here passes the test.

See, standardized tests, even though all the questions look different, really arrange themselves in six, seven, or eight different patterns of extracting information from the reading selection. In actual fact there are about 168 separate ways to extract information from a reading selection. Most people who read a lot learn those things automatically; they don't have to be taught them. But when you're taught reading, and when you think the prize is getting a high score on a standardized test, what happens inside your mind (this is really diabolical) is, if you're efficient, you tend to concentrate harder on the things that you recognize will show up as questions and answers on the test. You may not be aware you're doing that, but it will happen inevitably. As a consequence, out of the 168, you miss about 160 types of information that are in the reading selection."

The fear of common people learning too much is a recurrent theme in state records around the world. The founder of the Chinese state, the Emperor Ts’in She Hwang-ti, burned the work of the philosophers for fear their ideas would poison his own plans. The Caliph Ùmar of Syria wrote instructions to destroy the perhaps apocryphal library at Alexandria, using this airtight syllogism:

If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.2

Literary bonfires in Nazi Germany are often invoked as a vivid symbol of the deepest barbarism of the twentieth century, but extensive press coverage ended the book burning by stirring public uneasiness worldwide. Much more effective have been those silent blast furnaces used by public library systems and great American universities to dispose of 3 million excess books annually because of a shortage of shelf space. Why aren’t they given to schools?

There are other ways to burn books without matches. Consider the great leap forward undertaken in the modern Turkish state under Kemal Ataturk. Unlike Hitler, who burned only some of the past, Ataturk burned it all without fire by radically changing the Turkish national alphabet so that all the vital writings of the past were entombed in an obsolete symbol system. Not a single Turk voted to have this done, yet all accepted it.

From 1929 on, all books and newspapers were printed in the new alphabet. All documents were composed in it. All schoolchildren were instructed in it and no other. The classics of Persia, Arabia, and Turkey vanished without a trace for the next generation. Obliterate the national memory bound up in history and literature, sift carefully what can be translated, and you open a gulf between old and young, past and present, which can’t be bridged, rendering children vulnerable to any form of synthetic lore authorities deem advisable.

Turkish experimentation is echoed today in mainland China where a fifth of the population of the planet is cut off from the long past of Chinese literature and philosophy, one of the very few significant bodies of thought on the human record. The method being used is a radical simplification of the characters of the language which will have, in the fullness of time, the same effect as burning books, putting them effectively out of reach. Lord Lindsay of Birker, a professor at Yenching University outside Beijing where I recently went to see for myself the effects of Westernization on the young Chinese elite, says the generation educated entirely in simplified characters will have difficulty reading anything published in China before the late 1950s.

First, said Plato, wipe the slate clean.

There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books to be substituted for serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to the point that students become disgusted with reading because it demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have done that, too. One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do – forcing pictures and graphs into space where readers should be building pictures of their own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be expanding. In this we are the world’s master.

Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his "infinite delight" with Spenser’s Faerie Queen – an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its "Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses." Cowley was twelve at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it’s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. "Frank had a dog. His name was Spot." That happened."

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So the goal of standard education is to standardize people and standardize their behavior. This is consistent with encouraging Applied Behavior Analysis in schools and more specifically Statewide Positive Behavioral Support. If all people can be seen as being motivated by the same things, they can be ranked accordingly. This ranking is how individuals and individualistic views are discouraged.

People who communicate differently and may be more prone to different views and alternatives to tradition are a threat to polite society. Neurological differences (including autism) are not and cannot be respected while at the same time respecting tradition, scholastics, and politics. This realm is opposed to all types of diversity and all types of creative thinking.

The Internet is not inclusive of people with neurological differences. The exclusion of autistic people is supported by advocates who are interested more in a convenient tradition and showing how several autistics are already meeting the standards rather than revealing the contradiction and broadening those standards with a new way of looking at communication which traditional leaders have not yet explored.

If there is to be a change in how autistic people are treated it will come from listening to autistic people rather than continuing to honor the ongoing traditional attitude of ambitious scientists and politicians who demean and exclude us.

November 06, 2010

What threatens the continuation of the human species more than the ignorance of those who carry that label is the acceptance of wisdom and knowledge of those who do the labeling. What gets declared modern culture, western civilization, and scientific knowledge, receives a great deal of unearned respect and praise due to the many myths, which are advertised by those who have the power and means to do so. These are of course the people who benefit from such beliefs.

Compulsory education was never meant to be a liberator the way it's often claimed, and it was always understood by those who promoted this discipline that most people would be excluded by it.

By praising this institution, children were taught racism, consumerism, bullying, and many fantastic notions about the nature of humans.

The worst of what is promoted in schools is that leaders who are said to have earned that position are able to determine the nature of human thought patterns, promote particular public policy,advance warfare research using unwilling vulnerable subjects, harshly discriminate against diverse expression and alternatives to tradition in order to promote progress and a more civilized atmosphere.

Nothing has been used more to exploit people than the unrealistic hopes and expectations of modern medicine. With so many willing to trust in the magic potions created in the royal name of science this industry naturally chose to diversify and work with government officials to establish law and order according to a new science/product called psychology. This was added to the use of toxic potions meant to subdue and encourage compliance (called psychiatry)and the whole system works together to show how only a few elites are able to escape intellectual deficits and thinking disorders.

The one unique ability common to all creatures is that of cooperating with nature AND influencing their own future according to their understanding, of how they fit. It's not natural for people to believe that they don't fit. To encourage such myths require the aid of government, scholastic's, social engineers, and commercial advertising.

Nothing could help to discourage humans more than the belief that their ability to think and plan is disordered so that they feel vulnerable, dependent, and useless.

Communication disorders (also given the convenient title of thinking disorders) are due to diversity of the human species which influence how people think and express themselves in different ways. Disorder comes from a lack of acceptance and an attempt to understand the difference and yet the different individual rather than the system which created this supposed order as the result of prejudice, receives the blame.

We're configured in a variety of ways and have a multitude of experiences which science and medicine cannot track, study, or create statistics for. We have a mind which no microscope or sophisticated scientific instrument can provide a better understanding of.

If we're to maintain our dignity and encourage hope to fellow men and women, we must understand that it is the system which governs us that is incapable of determining a positive outcome for our future despite their attempts to do so. Order will come from the creativity we command when we choose to question our oppressors and think outside of the narrow context we have been taught to worship by the name of science, medicine, and scholastic achievement.